I’ve spent a long time looking for college. I knew that when I arrived on the first day, lumbering suitcases and parents in tow on a sticky August day, that it was here somewhere, and if everyone would just stop screaming their inane Residential College cheers for five minutes, I might be able to hear it.

Well my friends, we have come to the end. Soon, I’ll join the land of politicos in Washington D.C., to whom political arguments come more naturally than breathing. My family has lived in D.C. since my freshman year, and although I love living in a 68.3 square mile area packed tightly with a sea of navy blue suits, it’s hard to acknowledge that I will have to join the fray of voices in the most political city in America.

There are many who arrived at this school on their first days as wide-eyed freshmen, without a single day of formalized education in one vital subject.

While I was at the University of Oxford, I learned a lot of things. I learned about the best spots to sit in the lower level of the Radcliffe Camera, the joys of strawberries and clotted cream at boat races, the cheapest college bars for a pint of cider, the Latin grace said before formal college dinners.

Speak equivocally and carry a Tomahawk missile. Or at least, that is President Obama’s addition to the long line of presidents who have made excuses for justifying action abroad. As my fellow columnist Eve Samborn commented a few weeks ago, in “The Obama Doctrine”, the emergence of a new policy wasn’t too much of a surprise given the events of the last few weeks.

The British ambassador to the United States delivered a major policy address at Washington University on Friday afternoon in which he emphasized the importance of close U.S.-U.K. relations to the nations’ past and future prosperity.

Last Thursday, just as the wan winter light was starting to shine through my window, I awoke at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. to prepare for my first introduction to the whims and wiles of the Clayton court system. My notice had appeared innocuously enough, an indistinct white envelope with a form letter enclosed inside.

Addressing a packed auditorium, Strobe Talbott , the president of the Brookings Institution, spoke last Monday about political polarization and its effects on the functions of universities and think tanks. And while it appeared that Talbott had reached a point of agreement with the nodding heads in the room as he pledged the need for more consensual politics, I was not entirely convinced.

Yet what WikiLeaks represents is not accountability in the right light. Instead, this latest influx of information has cast a harsh mirror on our zeal for scandal, to the point where our international relationships could be irreparably damaged—not to mention the thousands of diplomatic associates and informants whose lives are now at risk.